[Dixielandjazz] Irving Berlin's piano

[Robert Ringwald]

Irving Berlin's piano

Be Careful, It's My Heart: An Irving Berlin Piano Is Moved
by James Barron
New York Times "City Room" blog, September 18, 2010

Josh Perelman loves a piano -- not just any piano, but the one on which Irving Berlin
wrote "I Love a Piano" in 1915. He loves it so much that he is borrowing it for 14
months.
Dr. Perelman is a deputy director of the National Museum of American Jewish History
in Philadelphia, which is preparing for the November opening of its new $150 million
home near Independence Mall. The piano -- no high-tone baby grand, but an upright,
and a distinctive one, at that -- will be part of an exhibition called "Only in America,"
about the Jewish experience in the United States.
All that explains why Dr. Perelman was standing in an alcove at Ascap's headquarters,
opposite Lincoln Center, where the Berlin piano has resided for 15 years while on
loan from his family. Before the movers wheeled it to a service elevator, Dr. Perelman
played a few chords.
"This is one of those artifacts that was in our dreams when we started our planning:
'Wouldn't it be amazing if we were able to bring Irving Berlin's piano to the public,'"
he said. "You can talk about him, you can show a movie about him, but to see the
piano, to see the mechanism, to feel, as I did, that you're really in Irving Berlin's
shoes -- that's something."
Berlin bought the piano for $100, big money for a former singing waiter in a Chinatown
restaurant, in 1909. He had other pianos later on, but that one was the one he had
when he wrote "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911.
"It was part of him," said his daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett.
As pianos go, it is distinctive because it came with a lever Berlin could pull or
push to transpose the music from one key to another -- the lever moved the keys so
the hammers could strike different strings. Berlin worked only in one key, F-sharp.
Singers may know "How Deep Is the Ocean" in E-flat or "Blue Skies" in the sunny key
of G, but they were all F-sharp tunes to him.
That gave rise to the tale Mrs. Barrett took issue with. "The one mistake people
make is they say, 'Irving Berlin only played the five black notes.' I say, no, he
played in the key of F-sharp, the black-note key." Of course, the key of F-sharp
has two white notes, E-sharp (which looks like F) and B.
But his pianos with the transposing mechanism, a mechanical contrivance that made
so many famous tunes possible, "became a legend," Mrs. Barrett said. She recalled
a conversation she had had with the actress Alice Faye, who starred in the 1938 film
version of "Alexander's Ragtime Band."
"She didn't have many memories except 'I remember him and that funny piano,'" Mrs.
Barrett said.
Music historians say Berlin had a name for his transposing piano: "The Buick." Whether
it first applied to the particular piano at Ascap or one of the others, Mrs. Barrett
did not know. Nor did she know which of Berlin's pianos might have inspired the song
that became "Me and My Melinda." The original version was about another three-syllable
mesmerizer:
Me and my piano, my piano and me
We are bound up together with sympathy
Me and my piano
We are seldom apart
On Thursday, the movers loaded the piano into a wooden crate. As the movers pushed
it onto West 64th Street, where their van was waiting, Dr. Perelman said goodbye
to Ascap officials who had tagged along as the piano was squeezed into a service
elevator and crated.
"We'll take good care of it," Dr. Perelman promised.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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